President Donald Trump on Friday had a lot to say about toilets, sinks and showers. The President claimed Americans are flushing their toilets "10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once" and argued that they are having difficulty with washing their hands in what appeared to be a tangent about low-flow sinks and toilets.

"We have a situation where we're looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms where you turn the faucet on -- and in areas where there's tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it, and you don't get any water," the President said during a roundtable with small business leaders about deregulatory actions.

"You turn on the faucet and you don't get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out. Just dripping out, very quietly dripping out," the President continued, lowering his voice as he spoke about the drips. "People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once."

It wasn't entirely clear what he was talking about but it appeared to have to do with bathroom fixtures with low-flow appliances. He said the Environmental Protection Agency was looking into the issue on his suggestion. "They end up using more water. So (the) EPA is looking at that very strongly at my suggestion," Trump said, though he did not give details on what suggestions, if any, he made. Video of the President's comments has been viewed more than a million times online.

Trump, speaking in the Roosevelt Room of the White House amid an impeachment inquiry, then turned his attention to Americans attempting to wash their hands. "You go into a new building or a new house or a new home and they have standards only you don't get water. You can't wash your hands practically, there's so little water comes out of the faucet. And the end result is you leave the faucet on and it takes you much longer to wash your hands," Trump said. He went on: "There may be some areas where we'll go the other route -- desert areas -- but for the most part you have many states where they have so much water -- it comes down, it's called rain. They don't know what to do with it," to laughs from around the table. "So we're going to be looking at opening up that I believe. And we're looking at changing the standards very soon."

It is also unclear what standards Trump was referring to or how they could be changing. The EPA has a voluntary program that labels efficient fixtures, such as showerheads, called WaterSense -- similar to EnergyStar for water, which helps conservation. A 1992 law also regulated showerhead pressure, but it was implemented through the Energy Department, not the EPA.

The EPA said it is reviewing relevant federal programs. "EPA is working with all federal partners including Department of Energy to review the implementation of the Federal Energy Management Plan and how it's relevant programs interact with it to ensure American consumers have more choice when purchasing water products," EPA spokesman Michael Abboud told CNN.

Re: Scientific discoveries and updates-other than global warmingHoly, moly! (Pictures at the link. Will you look at those fangs!)

This teeny skull trapped in amber belongs to the smallest dinosaur ever found

By Ben Guarino
March 11, 2020 at 9:00 a.m. PDT

A tiny skull of a wee predator that lived 99 million years ago is in all likelihood that of the smallest species of dinosaur found. Picture a hummingbird. With fangs.

An international team of paleontologists named this dinosaur Oculudentavis khaungraae — the first name, its genus, borrowed from Latin for “eye-teeth-bird”; the second, its species, after a person named Khaung Ra, who donated the amber-encased skull to China’s Hupoge Amber Museum. The skull and its toothy beak, described in journal Nature on Wednesday, are the only remains the paleontologists had to work with.

But what remarkable remains they are: Minus the snout, the skull measures about seven millimeters long (about a quarter of an inch). This dino head could rest, with area to spare, on the cap of a Triple-A battery.

“It’s smaller than the skulls that we find in hummingbirds,” said study author Lars Schmitz, a paleobiologist at the Keck Science Center in California. Birds are living dinosaurs, of which bee hummingbirds are the tiniest. But, extrapolating its body size from its skull, this newly discovered dinosaur could compete in size with the bee hummingbird.

“If it’s indeed a dinosaur, it’s definitely the smallest known extinct dinosaur,” said Ohio University paleontologist Lawrence Witmer, an expert in dinosaur heads who was not involved with the research. Oculudentavis “rivals the smallest avian dinosaurs — birds — known today,” he said.

Its large eye, domed skull and tapered, slender snout are characteristics of dinosaurs — and, more specifically, ancient birds. The researchers’ analysis placed the animal “fairly deep in the origin of birds,” Schmitz said, but with a “lot of uncertainty.” Without a skeleton to study, the scientists do not know whether the dinosaur could fly.

The fossil has a strange mixture of lizard- and birdlike traits. “It’s so tiny that it must be miniaturized, and evolutionary miniaturization can mess with the anatomy,” Witmer said. He added: “It would be super-helpful to know what kind of body was attached to that weird skull.”

In the past, when describing fossils, paleontologists have mistaken young animals for unusually small species. (A recent reexamination of leg fossils, once proposed to belong to a mini tyrannosaur species named Nanotyrannus, tilts the evidence heavily in favor of a different explanation: They are the legs of teenage T. rexes.) But Oculudentavis’s bone structure makes a convincing case for maturity.

“I accept that it’s an adult and not a young animal,” Witmer said, “which makes it all the more intriguing.”

The skull’s bony plates have stitched together, indicating this dinosaur was an adult, or nearly so. “We can look at the suture, the lines between different bone elements, and how well-fused they are,” Schmitz said. “It really looks like it’s an almost fully grown animal.”

Schmitz first met Oculudentavis as a digital scan of the dinosaur’s skull. He was astounded. “I was like, holy moly, this is really interesting,” he said. The fossil has an incredible amount of detail in three dimensions, said Schmitz, an eye expert, who was taken with its “very beautifully preserved eye.”

“We definitely can say that it’s a visually oriented animal,” Schmitz said. The size of the skull’s pupil hole suggests the dinosaur hunted during the day.

Unlike hummingbirds, which eat nectar, Oculudentavis was out for flesh. Each jaw sprouted about 30 sharp teeth per side. The dinosaur probably ate insects and other invertebrates, Schmitz said.

The skull was preserved when a gummy substance called resin, oozing from a tree, smothered the head. Over time, the resin hardened into amber, which was dug up in Myanmar.

“Amber has huge potential to preserve very small life,” Schmitz said. This dinosaur head joins an amber-trapped menagerie: a prehistoric spider frozen while attacking a wasp; very old frogs; even the nib of a feathered dinosaur tail. (The “Jurassic Park”-like scenario of extracting millions-of-years-old DNA from bloodsuckers in amber remains improbable.)

“It blows my mind,” said ReBecca Hunt-Foster, a park paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah who was not a member of the research team. Miniature bones such as this are “so delicate,” she said, and would “not have a chance” to survive the petrifying process — which occurs when organic matter turns to stone under layers of sediment — that creates large dinosaur fossils.

Paleontologists expect small dinosaurs would have lived alongside the massive animals that stomped across prehistoric landscapes. Oculudentavis helps flesh out the diversity of dinosaur life, Hunt-Foster said.

Although it was but little, perhaps it was fierce. What small animals lack in mass, as Hunt-Foster pointed out, they often make up in aggression.

Hummingbirds, for instance, will bully other birds away from flowers and feeders.

“A little hummingbird-like critter with teeth!” Hunt-Foster said. “Can you imagine a flock of these guys?”

Re: Scientific discoveries and updates-other than global warming(NBC News) - In an orange swirl, astronomers say humanity has its first look at the birth of a planet

An image of a cosmic spiral may be the first direct evidence of the birth of a planet ever captured by humanity. Astronomers believe the image, released Wednesday by the European Southern Observatory, shows the process of cosmic matter at a gravitational tipping point, collapsing into a new world. This rare glimpse could help scientists better understand how planets come to exist around stars.